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by deworms 1342 days ago
Purists who refuse to load websites with JS are such a small percentage of visitors they can be safely ignored. It's an uphill battle that they're losing very fast. I don't think you can use more than 5% of websites without JS in any capacity.

The whole point of websites is lost if they can't track visitors, see what they're paying attention to, and how to manipulate their behavior. Everyone's doing it, and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage. There are very few websites whose purpose is not to influence you to spend money on something. Most of the articles and posts you read are AI generated, or written by "content writers" never intended to be read by actual people, they're there for the google bot to keep some activity going.
2 comments
giantrobot 1342 days ago
> Purists who refuse to load websites with JS are such a small percentage of visitors they can be safely ignored.

Except they are not[0]. Besides micro browsers there's screen readers that can't even use sites that customize a bunch of div elements with no accessibility tags.

[0] https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/

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deworms 1342 days ago
For most commercial purposes screen readers can be safely ignored, they are not used by big spenders. Social share cards can be previewed readily and easily prepared without impacting the main content of the website.
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giantrobot 1342 days ago
Microbrowsers do not run JavaScript. That means if all the routing is handled by JavaScript or the only HTML served is a script tag a microbrowser will show nothing. More and more JavaScript monstrosities do not properly show up in share sheets because they offer no meaningful content to a microbrowser.
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chrismorgan 1342 days ago
As a practising JavaScript-decliner for a few years: your “only 5% work” figure is wildly, extremely wrong. It depends a little on what types of sites you’re dealing with, but for contenty sites rather than appy sites, I’d put it past 95%, with a few notable major site exceptions (so that by content it may well be below 95%) and certain subcategories that are more commonly broken.

And I’d say the battle has actually gained some ground in the last eight years, as server-side rendering of JavaScript content stacks has made headway.

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